THE DEVELOPMENT OF ARCHITECTURE 541
influence of a meteoric Scotsman, C. R. Mackintosh1 of Glasgow,
helped to clear away ornamental irrelevance.
Apart from big country houses (which comprise the bulk of
Lutyens's best work in these years), most of the period's largest
structures are to be seen in London; though what perhaps forms
its single finest group of public buildings stands at Cardiff—the
city hall and law courts designed by E. A. Rickards.2 Sir Edwin
Cooper's Marylebone town hall and Sir J. J. Buraet's northern
elevation for tie British Museum are good London examples of
what the age could achieve by way of monumental effect. Two
of the largest public buildings undertaken at this time were put
up to public competition, and so (as is likely to happen in that
case) fell to young and untried architects. The first instance was
that of the Anglican cathedral at Liverpool; and the second that
of the London county hall. The former, since its construction
was to proceed by stages and be spread over a long period of
years, was well adapted to engage a youthful genius; the latter,
an immense business building which needed to be completed
as quickly as possible, was not. In the one Sir Giles Gilbert Scott
has been able to evolve a work of outstanding importance. In
the other the result was the present county hall designed by Ralph
Knott, characterized by exceptionally bad internal planning,
but showing towards the Thames an imposing elevation.
A common feature of all the secular buildings just mentioned
was that, while built in the American manner on steel frames
and only, as it were, veneered with the traditional materials,
their elevations betrayed no sign of this new and revolutionary
mode of construction. Nor were their forms obviously dictated
by their various functions, but by the requirements of the style
to which each conformed—'style' continuing thus to be a kind
of fancy-dress. The first modern public building in Great
Britain, of which this could not be said, was C. R. Mackintosh's
1 Mackintosh (1869-1928) ranks high among 'inheritors of unfulfilled renown'.
In Great Britain he encountered so much disapproval that he obtained few com-
missions—too few to express his genius. But in Austria, Germany, France, Belgium,
Holland, and Scandinavia his ideas were received with enthusiasm between 1900
and 1914, and inspired the movement known as Fart noweau. He has been described
by a recent critic as 'the first British architect since Adam to be a name abroad, and
the only one who has ever become the rallying-point of a Continental school of
design* (P. Morton Shand in The Architectural Review, Jan. 1935).
* The splendid grouping of these great edifices with others designed later^by
different architects seems to have started in Great Britain the idea of the *civic
centre', followed since the war at Leeds, Southampton, and elsewhere.